Backup & Recovery / Restore Options

I sell workstations and servers to clients for video recording. Actually the use of the machines is not that important. What is important is that quite a bit of configuration goes into these boxes. The operating systems range from XP Home all the way to Server 2008 both 32bit and 64 bit versions where applicable. Once they are set up they do not have any changes at all made to them, not even windows updates.

The following are what I think are most important features (prior to any feedback here)
Complete bare metal restore ability
Partial restore ability - restore only selected programs or OS issues that may have become corrupt
Ease of use is very important
Reliability - it has to have a proven track record
Price - we need something that is economical
I need to be able to leave a DVD on site that the user can boot off of or recover off of
If data will not fit on a DVD I will use a removable HD.

full or partial backup to usb.
has the ability to boot from Bart PE and restore full or partial
you even can go into the image and extract single files if needed.
works on windows 7, windows xp, windows server, etc.
and good news, its only 49.00.
I use it.. i love it.
and yes, i have done full image restores successfully.
just make sure you verify the image.

IFW does indeed work well, although I prefer Boot-It NG (also from Terabyte). Both are rock-solid utilities that do exactly what's advertised. Boot-It is perhaps a bit "geekier", but I don't like running imaging utilities from within Windows ... live imaging can have too many things go wrong.

However ... regardless of which one (or any other package) that you use, I'd suggest an organizational structure for your disks that make things much simpler for recover ==> install the OS and all of the programs on one partition; but make a 2nd partition for the data ... and relocate all data folders (Documents, Music, Pictures, Favorites, Address Book, e-mail storage, etc.) to that 2nd partition.

With this structure, a restore has NO impact on the data. You can also keep the image on the 2nd partition, so it's VERY simple to do a restore (although I'd also keep a copy somewhere else -- perhaps on the user's backup disk -- to protect against hard drive failure).

The following are what I think are most important features (prior to any feedback here)

Complete bare metal restore ability

- Yes, possible with various software.

Partial restore ability - restore only selected programs or OS issues that may have become corrupt

- Possible partially. You can restore file only. I do not know any software that would restore single program of Windows registry from backup (other than NTbackup). If they say - we can do it - do not trust. Any program or Windows registry will be restored as simple file (program will not work after restore. Sure if it is not a portable program).

Ease of use is very important

- Not a problem.

Reliability - it has to have a proven track record

- Not a problem.

Price - we need something that is economical

- Not a problem.

I need to be able to leave a DVD on site that the user can boot off of or recover off of

- All of well known Backup & Recovery tools have the CD\USB stick now.

If data will not fit on a DVD I will use a removable

HD. - Not a problem.

I recommend you cost effective and rock solid software Paragon Drive Backup 10 for Server and Backup & Recovery 10 Home for non server systems: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/brh/
Migration to dissimilar hardware, various recovery environments, selective restore etc. All in one tool.

Thanks for all of the feedback guys.
Paragon was expensive for server backup. I like that IFW was one price and the same version worked for standard and server OS types.
My video data is already segregated from the OS drive but it never occurred to me to keep the backup data for the OS on my video drives, good idea garycase.
Thanks again everyone

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